I've been enjoying Almost Human this season in the same way that I've enjoyed a vast number of entertaining-yet-average TV shows over the years: with amusement, a dash of fondness, and occasional cheering when the production team manages to turn out an episode that's more competent than usual. And yet with most of those other shows, I never finished up the first season with the sneaking suspicion that I had just been watching five different shows.
I'm not even talking about the fact that the show was a mishmash of tropes I've seen a thousand times before, even though it was — the buddy cop aspects are pretty damn standard, and John's manpain and wobbly standing in the police department, and I can name at least three different movies/books/TV shows about a grumpy, robot-hating human cop who's forced to pair up with, surprise of surprises, a humanoid robot, and then they all end up learning valuable lessons about humanity. Sometimes the grumpy, robot-hating human cop is even cybernetically modified, too. We've all seen I, Robot, right?
I will at least give Almost Human props for not being entirely about white dudes, which is more than I can say for a lot of sci-fi shows.
But anyway, that's not the point. This isn't just me having flashbacks to the ghosts of stories past; this is a narrative identity crisis. It's sort of like what I imagine would happen if identical quintuplets enrolled in high school under one name and all took turns pretending to be the same person. The superficial resemblance was there, but other concerns tended to vary wildly.
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| Okay guys, remember: we're in love with the quarterback, we hate science, and we have three things due in AP Lit. And I swear, Number 2, if you try and flirt with the TA one more time... |
